The Movie Club: 80s Trek

[sarakingdom]

I have lost my ST3 DVD.

 

I am searching for the search for Spock.

 

[Harriet]

9 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

(While we're on the subject of Jim Kirk being a raging human supremacist, in what world is it a compliment to give a eulogy for his "I know he's human, but nobody's perfect" friend by saying his was the most human soul he'd ever known? Let's hope no one ever sends Spock the VHS of his own funeral.)

 

"I didn't mind him, for a non-vulcan."

 

9 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

I'm not even certain that line really holds up as a theme, because Kirk is making a faulty analogy to what Spock did. Spock gave a life to save many lives, trading like for like. His friends gave up careers to save a life (or afterlife). If weighing the needs of the many and the one included things that are relative inconveniences next to the thing they supposedly outweigh, then it's never acceptable to do anything for an individual. I mean, sure, we could take you to hospital and set your leg, but think of  the inconvenience to the ambulance driver we'd have to call out, the anesthetist, the doctor, two nurses... no, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, sorry, kid. So I'm sure there is a theme about sacrificing for friendship and whatever, but that line is just Kirk being a culturally insensitive jerk trying to win an argument with a dude who barely remembered his own name.

 

It could also be another principle, namely you don't leave anyone behind, or you do for others what you'd want them to do for you. It only seems illogical if you treat it as a one-off act rather than a principle that all crew members (except anonymous redshirts) can rely on, and which therefore boosts moral and emboldens them to take risks.

 

...

 

Yay! The movie was exciting! The movie was good! They got Spock back from under the sofa! I think the pacing and plot was a little more pleasing than the first movie, and I am of course glad to have Spock back. I really thought the genesis matter was going to merge with him and make him a part genesis part vulcan hybrid, but no. I was slightly worried about the pon farr and that Saavik (who is new and different???) was going to do therapeutic yet highly inappropriate sex with a soulless yet distressed vulcan body that was both underage AND elderly. But if they did, then it was off screen.

 

The Klingon dog was a terrible dog. It just seemed a lot more gooey than you would usually want a dog to be.

 

The Klingon boss was considerably less memorable than Khan.

 

And I thought you needed someone to stand and operate the transporter. Though of course it would be very sensible to have a timer.

[sarakingdom]

2 minutes ago, Harriet said:

It could also be another principle, namely you don't leave anyone behind, or you do for others what you'd want them to do for you. It only seems illogical if you treat it as a one-off act rather than a principle that all crew members (except anonymous redshirts) can rely on, and which therefore boosts moral and emboldens them to take risks.

 

Since they think he's dead until they show up and he's not, I think it's probably "you honor the dead the right way". They found out they didn't, and there was some mystical Vulcan shit going on, and they all went, well, we'd better fix that. But yeah, it's not illogical to honor the sorts of sacrifices everyone benefits from.

 

5 minutes ago, Harriet said:

Yay! The movie was exciting! The movie was good! They got Spock back from under the sofa! I think the pacing and plot was a little more pleasing than the first movie, and I am of course glad to have Spock back.

 

It was! It is! They do! Wrath of Khan was better than I remembered, but Search for Spock feels like there's more going on. Khan is like a big TOS episode, while SfS is... bigger. You see more of the Star Trek universe. The plot feels a little tighter and a little fresher. Everyone gets their moment.

 

I think also it was kind of a funnier movie. Khan wasn't bad on that front, but SfS has got tighter, funnier dialog.

 

9 minutes ago, Harriet said:

Saavik (who is new and different???)

 

Yeah, they got a new actress. The other one... I dunno, the rumor was she demanded star money to do it, but she has always been a little bonkers, too.

 

I kind of prefer this one, to be honest. She feels more Vulcan.

 

12 minutes ago, Harriet said:

was slightly worried about the pon farr and that Saavik (who is new and different???) was going to do therapeutic yet highly inappropriate sex with a soulless yet distressed vulcan body that was both underage AND elderly. But if they did, then it was off screen.

 

They did. It was offscreen. Not, biologically speaking, a ton of other options. I am, however, deeply grateful that it was not done in an exploitative way. That would have been so much worse in nearly anyone else's hands. It was done kindly and matter-of-factly, and I can appreciate that as alien cultural worldbuilding. You know any other director would have tried to use it to sex up a movie with no other sex appeal. Thank god Leonard Nimoy is utterly fucking trustworthy, both with Vulcans and with not being a giant bag of dicks to women. (Which honestly makes him one of a very small number of men in some production-related role on Star Trek who was not a giant bag of dicks to women.)

 

There is absolutely zero sexual objectification in that movie, as I recall, and that's not even entirely true of Khan. (Close, but there's at least one "Kirk perving on Saavik in a wistful 'if I were 20 years younger' way" scene.) The women are deeply underused, but when they're onscreen, they're used very, very well. Uhura fucking deserved that scene after years of answering the telephone, and Saavik ran the show till other officers showed up.

 

29 minutes ago, Harriet said:

The Klingon dog was a terrible dog. It just seemed a lot more gooey than you would usually want a dog to be.

 

Klingons have strange tastes. Worms for dinner and slimy dogs. Who knows.

 

30 minutes ago, Harriet said:

The Klingon boss was considerably less memorable than Khan.

 

 No one is as amazing as Ricardo Montalban, sadly. Christopher Lloyd is good, but no one is Ricardo Montalban.

 

31 minutes ago, Harriet said:

And I thought you needed someone to stand and operate the transporter. Though of course it would be very sensible to have a timer.

 

That was surely the whole plot justification for leaving Uhura behind. Actually, that's just a weird plot hole, which I assume happened because no one could think of anything for her to do in the rest of the movie. It's not like anything she could do would hide the fact that Kirk was stealing a starship once he... stole the starship, and while they still had time on their side, I don't know why they didn't bother to beam her over once they got to Enterprise and could operate the transporter from that end, rather than leave her to evade security forces on her own. I mean, she's amazing and did that, but apparently not leaving your own behind only applies to the dudes?

 

But I will overlook it, because IMO that's a movie that's 100% about McCoy and Sarek with a side of Uhura.

[Harriet]

1 hour ago, sarakingdom said:

 

Since they think he's dead until they show up and he's not, I think it's probably "you honor the dead the right way". They found out they didn't, and there was some mystical Vulcan shit going on, and they all went, well, we'd better fix that. But yeah, it's not illogical to honor the sorts of sacrifices everyone benefits from.

 

 

Well, if he can communicate with McCoy then he's not dead dead. Not in my book of the dead, anyway.  And they had to save McCoy, too.

 

1 hour ago, sarakingdom said:

It was! It is! They do! Wrath of Khan was better than I remembered, but Search for Spock feels like there's more going on. Khan is like a big TOS episode, while SfS is... bigger. You see more of the Star Trek universe. The plot feels a little tighter and a little fresher. Everyone gets their moment.

 

I think also it was kind of a funnier movie. Khan wasn't bad on that front, but SfS has got tighter, funnier dialog.

 

True!

 

1 hour ago, sarakingdom said:

They did. It was offscreen. Not, biologically speaking, a ton of other options. I am, however, deeply grateful that it was not done in an exploitative way. That would have been so much worse in nearly anyone else's hands. It was done kindly and matter-of-factly, and I can appreciate that as alien cultural worldbuilding. You know any other director would have tried to use it to sex up a movie with no other sex appeal. Thank god Leonard Nimoy is utterly fucking trustworthy, both with Vulcans and with not being a giant bag of dicks to women. (Which honestly makes him one of a very small number of men in some production-related role on Star Trek who was not a giant bag of dicks to women.)

 

It was indeed unobtrusive and tasteful, as alien sex goes. From within the story, it seems both parties are willing and not worse off. From without the story, one is keenly aware of exactly the kind of animal that invents a fictional male alien that will literally die without sex.

 

1 hour ago, sarakingdom said:

There is absolutely zero sexual objectification in that movie, as I recall, and that's not even entirely true of Khan. (Close, but there's at least one "Kirk perving on Saavik in a wistful 'if I were 20 years younger' way" scene.) The women are deeply underused, but when they're onscreen, they're used very, very well. Uhura fucking deserved that scene after years of answering the telephone, and Saavik ran the show till other officers showed up.

 

True that. I wonder if there are any, ANY modern movies that don't have at least a few sexy lampshade women? 

 

1 hour ago, sarakingdom said:

That was surely the whole plot justification for leaving Uhura behind. Actually, that's just a weird plot hole, which I assume happened because no one could think of anything for her to do in the rest of the movie. It's not like anything she could do would hide the fact that Kirk was stealing a starship once he... stole the starship, and while they still had time on their side, I don't know why they didn't bother to beam her over once they got to Enterprise and could operate the transporter from that end, rather than leave her to evade security forces on her own. I mean, she's amazing and did that, but apparently not leaving your own behind only applies to the dudes?

 

But I will overlook it, because IMO that's a movie that's 100% about McCoy and Sarek with a side of Uhura.

 

I, too, will overlook it. I have disbelief-suspension skills and will use them as necessary for narrative enjoyment.

[Tanktimus the Encourager]

11 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

I really could watch an endless amount of Kelley and Nimoy. It's a shame about that third wheel spoiling things.

They managed with Shatner around...

[sarakingdom]

2 hours ago, Harriet said:

Well, if he can communicate with McCoy then he's not dead dead. Not in my book of the dead, anyway.  And they had to save McCoy, too.

 

He's not communicating with McCoy, though. He put his space-soul into McCoy, the way Vulcans do before they die. McCoy was acting weird because he had two minds in his brain, neither one of which had any idea the body was still alive. They could have saved McCoy just by taking him to Vulcan and getting it out again in some normal funeral way. I genuinely don't know what they needed the body for; that seemed to get tacked on after they viewed the security footage. Though his father did seem really annoyed that they left the body behind, so presumably there was some ritual they needed to do to it. That's... I don't know, half a plot hole. They hint there's a reason, but not hard enough that we know what it is, other than being offended his remains had been shot into space instead of sent home.

 

2 hours ago, Harriet said:

From without the story, one is keenly aware of exactly the kind of animal that invents a fictional male alien that will literally die without sex.

 

Gene Roddenberry was, as I've said somewhere before, if not the full dumpster fire, at least a smoking trash can. But when it came to women, honestly, he was kind of a dumpster fire. His feminism began and ended with whatever made it easier to objectify and commodity women, and I believe he casting-couched at least two of the three female regulars on Star Trek (and I've forgotten why the third left the show, but part of my brain is supplying "sexual harassment" as the reason). It is no wonder there was some grossness towards women behind the scenes on the next three shows, given the sort of dudes he was likely to put in charge of the whole thing. What's amazing is that what we got onscreen after that wasn't worse.

 

Though, having just slagged off Roddenberry, I don't actually know if he imposed that on the story, or if it was in Sturgeon's original script. Sturgeon is supposed to be a pretty good classic SF writer and he doesn't have the Me Too sort of reputation that, say, an Asimov has, so I'd like to think not, but you never know. That generation of SF writers could go either way. But I'm inclined to blame Roddenberry, because TOS not only contains every single "forced to have sex" trope in TV Tropes, but invented most of them, from "aliens made them do it" to "sex pollen". It's the non-porn equivalent of having the space pizza delivery boy show up at the start of every episode.

 

(Shit, I've just looked up why Grace Lee Whitney left, and I half-remembered it. It needs a trigger warning, I'd put money on it being Roddenberry, and, damn, Nimoy was a decent human being.)

 

2 hours ago, Harriet said:

True that. I wonder if there are any, ANY modern movies that don't have at least a few sexy lampshade women? 

 

I... can't think of anything aiming for big blockbuster status, at any rate. Little sleepy art films, sure, but action or SF films? Well,  no, that's not entirely fair, because some of them technically exceed sexy lamp criteria, in that they have some relevance to the plot beyond being heavily sexualized. But they're still heavily sexualized, and that's the real problem.

 

Wait, there's one. Mad Max: Fury Road did earn its feminist cred pretty fairly, and is pretty close to flawless there. Some of the characters objectified the women, but the film did not; the whole explicit plot of the film was the rejection of female objectification, and it runs pretty solidly throughout. And they also kept the exploitative scenes their plot implied offscreen, rather than use them to sex it up. But everything about that film is notorious for being both shockingly good compared to what people expected of it and for flying sharply in the face of the standard way modern films are made.

 

 

1 hour ago, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

They managed with Shatner around...

 

They did pretty well, it's true. But I like my drugs uncut with filler.

 

A few weeks ago, I was teasing my Star Trek friend, and managed to at least half-convince her that this scene:

 

 

...proved that Spock and McCoy were married. They argued like an old married couple, but McCoy was always locker-room-bantering with the guy; he explicitly apologised the one time he completely unintentionally was actually a bit racist about Vulcans. So the one thing that could get him this heated about Vulcans to a third party was if Spock had won the argument about having to wear his warm admiral sweater because it was cold in space and he was 137 years old, and he was still pissed off about it. Then he dies at 139 or so, and Spock, being widowed and having another fifty years, can devote his life to his second diplomatic career without abandoning a spouse.

 

I mean, one just can't argue with logic.

[Harriet]

14 minutes ago, sarakingdom said:

He's not communicating with McCoy, though. He put his space-soul into McCoy, the way Vulcans do before they die. McCoy was acting weird because he had two minds in his brain, neither one of which had any idea the body was still alive. They could have saved McCoy just by taking him to Vulcan and getting it out again in some normal funeral way. I genuinely don't know what they needed the body for; that seemed to get tacked on after they viewed the security footage. Though his father did seem really annoyed that they left the body behind, so presumably there was some ritual they needed to do to it. That's... I don't know, half a plot hole. They hint there's a reason, but not hard enough that we know what it is, other than being offended his remains had been shot into space instead of sent home.

 

Hmmm. What did they go back to genesis for? Confusion.

 

14 minutes ago, sarakingdom said:

But I'm inclined to blame Roddenberry, because TOS not only contains every single "forced to have sex" trope in TV Tropes, but invented most of them, from "aliens made them do it" to "sex pollen".

 

Ah yes, sex pollen. That happens to me often if I don't close the windows in summer.

 

14 minutes ago, sarakingdom said:

Wait, there's one. Mad Max: Fury Road did earn its feminist cred pretty fairly, and is pretty close to flawless there. Some of the characters objectified the women, but the film did not; the whole explicit plot of the film was the rejection of female objectification, and it runs pretty solidly throughout. And they also kept the exploitative scenes their plot implied offscreen, rather than use them to sex it up. But everything about that film is notorious for being both shockingly good compared to what people expected of it and for flying sharply in the face of the standard way modern films are made.

 

Indeed? Mad max goes on my list of most hated recent shows, along with the second blade runner and game of thrones. I felt the brutality against women was more for the purpose of titillation and "grittiness" than for feminist critique, though we can never prove the makers' intentions one way or another. To me it doesn't matter; I have seen enough such material for a lifetime and now filter all potential tv and films for such themes/on screen violence before watching. I would rather see women characters just doing cool stuff, instead of another "look how dark and rapey my dystopia is" type film.  And I do think the very thin supermodel ladies in their skimpy floaty outfits were sexy lampshades.

[Tanktimus the Encourager]

45 minutes ago, sarakingdom said:

Gene Roddenberry was, as I've said somewhere before, if not the full dumpster fire, at least a smoking trash can. But when it came to women, honestly, he was kind of a dumpster fire. His feminism began and ended with whatever made it easier to objectify and commodity women, and I believe he casting-couched at least two of the three female regulars on Star Trek (and I've forgotten why the third left the show, but part of my brain is supplying "sexual harassment" as the reason). It is no wonder there was some grossness towards women behind the scenes on the next three shows, given the sort of dudes he was likely to put in charge of the whole thing. What's amazing is that what we got onscreen after that wasn't worse.

 

Though, having just slagged off Roddenberry, I don't actually know if he imposed that on the story, or if it was in Sturgeon's original script. Sturgeon is supposed to be a pretty good classic SF writer and he doesn't have the Me Too sort of reputation that, say, an Asimov has, so I'd like to think not, but you never know. That generation of SF writers could go either way. But I'm inclined to blame Roddenberry, because TOS not only contains every single "forced to have sex" trope in TV Tropes, but invented most of them, from "aliens made them do it" to "sex pollen". It's the non-porn equivalent of having the space pizza delivery boy show up at the start of every episode.

 

(Shit, I've just looked up why Grace Lee Whitney left, and I half-remembered it. It needs a trigger warning, I'd put money on it being Roddenberry, and, damn, Nimoy was a decent human being.)

He married Majel Barrett (Nurse chapel, later Lwaxana Troi and the voice of all Starfleet Computers from TNG onward), it's an open secret he and Nichelle Nichols slept together, and the thing you mentioned. His own authorized Biography straight out stated explicitly that during the run of TNG, he was married to his first wife, having a full time affair with Majel Barrett, running around with occasional third girlfriends, having random weekend flings, and a bunch of one night stands on top of everything else. He was very misogynistic.

[sarakingdom]

22 minutes ago, Harriet said:

Hmmm. What did they go back to genesis for? Confusion.

 

I have to assume that the Vulcans just thought disposing of the body that way was damned disrespectful. They don't have a burial at sea tradition. You'd think they'd be logical about the body being waste, but sometimes they surprise you with their bizarre alien shit.

 

24 minutes ago, Harriet said:

Ah yes, sex pollen. That happens to me often if I don't close the windows in summer.

 

I suppose, technically, all pollen is sex pollen. It's just a question of who's having the sex.

 

25 minutes ago, Harriet said:

Indeed? Mad max goes on my list of most hated recent shows, along with the second blade runner and game of thrones. I felt the brutality against women was more for the purpose of titillation and "grittiness" than for feminist critique, though we can never prove the makers' intentions one way or another. To me it doesn't matter; I have seen enough such material for a lifetime and now filter all potential tv and films for such themes/on screen violence before watching. I would rather see women characters just doing cool stuff, instead of another "look how dark and rapey my dystopia is" type film.  And I do think the very thin supermodel ladies in their skimpy floaty outfits were sexy lampshades.

 

It's a fine line to walk and an understandable thing to want a hard ban on, so I can understand that, but I thought they were very careful to avoid even depicting exploitative violence, let alone dwelling on it in a titillating way. It was in the backstory, but the only thing they showed onscreen was repeated rejection and leaving it behind. It was unusually aware of the pitfalls of its "we are not things" text and subtext. The couple of times it briefly depicted women that way, they were deliberately and spitefully using male objectification against them, and the audience didn't get a show out of it. I'm with you on being tired of those sorts of exploitative gritty stories, and I thought this one was extraordinarily strong. Multiple generations of women joining up to literally topple the patriarchy and turn a water citadel into a desert garden oasis run by women? It was such a massive rejection of the premise of all the previous Mad Max films. (Speaking of Voyager reversing the traditional gender roles and making men the supporting characters for the protagonist women, Fury Road does that so hard it's literal at points.)

 

I grant you that thin women in floaty white costumes is borderline, but they earned some goodwill from me for having a solid thematic reason why as well as a plot reason, not exploiting it with lots of overt sexuality for the camera, giving multiple 70-year-old women very badass parts, and having the bait character be a woman in her 50s. The "we are not things" lesson applies to the expected target audience expecting to be able to comfortably sexualize those girls as much as the antagonists in the film. All those things together read to me like depicting their own audience's biases onscreen and commenting on them, not pandering to them.

 

But it is, as I said, a very fine line. Even Law & Order SVU wants to play its feminist card, when it's the prime offender.

 

50 minutes ago, Harriet said:

though we can never prove the makers' intentions one way or another

 

We can't, though I did read a lot of interviews with the director and the film's editor (his wife) at the time, and the feminist critique was very, very deliberate. In the thirty years between the previous film and this one, the dude had a huge education in feminism.

 

52 minutes ago, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

He married Majel Barrett (Nurse chapel, later Lwaxana Troi and the voice of all Starfleet Computers from TNG onward), it's an open secret he and Nichelle Nichols slept together, and the thing you mentioned. His own authorized Biography straight out stated explicitly that during the run of TNG, he was married to his first wife, having a full time affair with Majel Barrett, running around with occasional third girlfriends, having random weekend flings, and a bunch of one night stands on top of everything else. He was very misogynistic.

 

I knew about Barrett; the reason she was blond was that he thought maybe the execs wouldn't notice he'd recast the girlfriend he had cast in the failed pilot. And I knew the open secret about Nichols. I'd like to think he wasn't the exec in question for Whitney, but, come on, we all know he must have been, and who else could she have been afraid would end her Star Trek career so decisively. He was infamous for perving on the women of Star Trek. Even the studio was asking him to cut it out, so it must have been egregious indeed.

 

Absolutely the full dumpster fire when it came to women and sex. It's sad Barrett got stuck with the jerk. And it's not a criticism that a large subset of the audience is willing to hear about him. But I'm super glad most of the TOS movies were in better hands.

[Scaly Freak]

I somehow missed Fury Road when it came out and never became that curious about it, but now I kind of want to watch it after all. If nothing else because I'm now starting to form a theory about where all the negative things I heard about that movie really came from.....

[Harriet]

26 minutes ago, sarakingdom said:

 

I have to assume that the Vulcans just thought disposing of the body that way was damned disrespectful. They don't have a burial at sea tradition. You'd think they'd be logical about the body being waste, but sometimes they surprise you with their bizarre alien shit.

 

Vulcan mysticism. Vulcan sex. They aren't logical. They just store up their illogical emotions and give them vent in highly specific ways.

 

26 minutes ago, sarakingdom said:

 

I suppose, technically, all pollen is sex pollen. It's just a question of who's having the sex.

 

Lol there is that. Makes me feel weird about these allergies ?

 

26 minutes ago, sarakingdom said:

It's a fine line to walk and an understandable thing to want a hard ban on, so I can understand that, but I thought they were very careful to avoid even depicting exploitative violence, let alone dwelling on it in a titillating way. It was in the backstory, but the only thing they showed onscreen was repeated rejection and leaving it behind. It was unusually aware of the pitfalls of its "we are not things" text and subtext. The couple of times it briefly depicted women that way, they were deliberately and spitefully using male objectification against them, and the audience didn't get a show out of it. I'm with you on being tired of those sorts of exploitative gritty stories, and I thought this one was extraordinarily strong. Multiple generations of women joining up to literally topple the patriarchy and turn a water citadel into a desert garden oasis run by women? It was such a massive rejection of the premise of all the previous Mad Max films. (Speaking of Voyager reversing the traditional gender roles and making men the supporting characters for the protagonist women, Fury Road does that so hard it's literal at points.)

 

The ban is only for me, not for anyone else. I just want to see films where women are human (or alien) and do cool stuff, please. Some fighting is fine. Just not lingering close ups of terrified non-combatants.

 

26 minutes ago, sarakingdom said:

I grant you that thin women in floaty white costumes is borderline, but they earned some goodwill from me for having a solid thematic reason why as well as a plot reason, not exploiting it with lots of overt sexuality for the camera, giving multiple 70-year-old women very badass parts, and having the bait character be a woman in her 50s. The "we are not things" lesson applies to the expected target audience expecting to be able to comfortably sexualize those girls as much as the antagonists in the film. All those things together read to me like depicting their own audience's biases onscreen and commenting on them, not pandering to them.

 

I understand your reasoning, and I certainly love seeing older women given strong roles. I hope you're right about the target audience, but I'm not sure that the film would really cause sexist men to think twice. I think that creating and focusing on extraordinarily violent and psychopathic villains actually helps us avoid looking at how common and mundane the mistreatment of women is. We like to believe there are a small number of monsters and that they're nothing like other men. Monsters do not really encourage us to examine the structural aspects of injustice, nor forms of misbehaviour that we have completely normalised and justified. They do admittedly make for good stories, though.

 

26 minutes ago, sarakingdom said:

But it is, as I said, a very fine line. Even Law & Order SVU wants to play its feminist card, when it's the prime offender.

Yeahhh I can't watch that, either.

 

26 minutes ago, sarakingdom said:

 

We can't, though I did read a lot of interviews with the director and the film's editor (his wife) at the time, and the feminist critique was very, very deliberate. In the thirty years between the previous film and this one, the dude had a huge education in feminism.

 

That's good to know! Still a nope for me personally, but let a thousand films flourish.

[sarakingdom]

4 hours ago, Scaly Freak said:

I somehow missed Fury Road when it came out and never became that curious about it, but now I kind of want to watch it after all. If nothing else because I'm now starting to form a theory about where all the negative things I heard about that movie really came from.....

 

Yes. Those negative reviews came from exactly the place you're thinking of. It was infamous for it at the time.

 

I totally understand Harriet's issues with it, but FWIW, I thought it was an unusually near-perfect feminist film, and, bizarrely for one of the Mad Max series, almost like an auteur style film in terms of craftsmanship. The plot was very literally "dozens of women work together to overturn the patriarchy and win", and Max, as he often is, is the mythical character who wanders through their lives... except this time, instead of being the savior cop, he's the supporting role to the female protagonist, and entirely happy with that role.

 

And the director was intensely generous about giving a lot of the credit to his wife for the film working; a lot of directors have wives or female collaborators who are the editors on their films, like Lucas and his wife editing the original Star Wars trilogy, but few of them ever walk into publicity interviews and acknowledge that the editor is as or more important than the director in making the film. Scorsese and Schoonmaker come close, but George Miller basically co-credited his film to Margaret Sixel in his interviews. (And she deservedly won tons of big awards for it.)

[sarakingdom]

5 hours ago, Harriet said:

Vulcan mysticism. Vulcan sex. They aren't logical. They just store up their illogical emotions and give them vent in highly specific ways.

 

Basically that. They're an advanced peaceful scientific society grafted onto a secretive violently medieval one.

 

Also, I really want the "Vulcans are emotionless" brigade to tell me with a straight face that Spock's father wasn't dangerously furious when he walked into Kirk's apartment. The sheer grief and fury of that scene was about the most thinly controlled you'll ever see a Vulcan. Dude literally nearly cried when he realized Spock was lost forever. And that's from about the most Vulcan of Vulcans.

 

5 hours ago, Harriet said:

Lol there is that. Makes me feel weird about these allergies ?

 

It's understandable that it feels weird. Plants are having sex in your nose.

 

5 hours ago, Harriet said:

I just want to see films where women are human (or alien) and do cool stuff, please. Some fighting is fine. Just not lingering close ups of terrified non-combatants.

 

Yeah, there's a deep lack of stuff like that. It's very slim representation in the film world. And in a lot of the ones that do okay, there's still a fair amount of Token Girl syndrome. (For instance, Rogue One was a great film and treated their female lead super well, but hanging all the representation on one woman is not the way.)  I'm coming to really respect the few shows that make sure they have multiple women. I can't think of any that pass the "17% is equality, 33% is a majority of women" benchmarks people instinctively feel, but at least there are a few shows that go for the 33%. (Maybe Buffy was actually 50% women in the main roles. Doctor Who sort of is, but something about that feels like cheating when they're dropping, on average, two regulars into a new cast and genre every episode. In that one, it's far more dominated by the non-regulars. But it's a small number, is what I'm saying.)

 

This, IMO, is one of the things Star Trek has always done unusually well with women. Women have always made up about 33% of their cast, usually three of eight or nine. Admittedly, the execs have often thought that means one is disposable because they have too many women (hi, TOS and TNG), but they always stick roughly around that ratio, which is well over where most shows put their "we have reached parity" numbers, because studies show people feel there's parity under 20%. Trek usually underused women, at least until DS9 and Voyager fixed that, but they have them.

 

5 hours ago, Harriet said:

I hope you're right about the target audience, but I'm not sure that the film would really cause sexist men to think twice.

 

I agree with you on the normalising of violent narratives about women and the focus on othering the perpetrators, but I don't think that happened in with this film. It was an utter lightning rod for audiences; it immediately divided them into those threatened by feminism and those who supported it, and made people pick their side. No one missed the message of the film. And because it was 100% unfiltered George Miller, 70-year-old guy single-handedly responsible for the testosterone-fueled Mad Max franchise, no one could dismiss it as SJW meddling by special interest groups. It was a very interesting conversation at the time. I don't know who it convinced, but the audience had a real conversation about objectification and feminism in film. That was the big reason I went to see it, because, while I enjoy some punk dystopia, I didn't really have much Mad Max nostalgia, and had even lower hopes for a film made by an old white dude reliving his big hit B-movie franchise of thirty years earlier. I thought it'd be as regressive as hell. The film was a huge shock when it dropped for how currently and pointedly political it was. Some of the traditional Mad Max audience was ready for it and welcomed it with open arms, and some of the traditional audience completely rejected it, but none of them missed the message. It's been swept under the carpet and largely forgotten since then, but it was a huge fucking deal at the time. No one came out and called George Miller an SJW snowflake because of who he was, but they really wanted to, and made all the same arguments about the film. It was a really polarising film. And Miller absolutely knew it, and welcomed it.

[sarakingdom]

5 hours ago, Harriet said:

That's good to know! Still a nope for me personally, but let a thousand films flourish.

 

I forgot this bit, but ditto on this. I respect your nope, and also totally understand the line drawn. Sometimes, no matter how good a thing might be, I'm simply not in the market for a helping of what it's serving up, and there's no question this whole franchise is an aggressive and unsubtle violence-fest of futuristic dystopia, and, like, I know why that's not what people want to sign up for.

[Scaly Freak]

11 minutes ago, sarakingdom said:

The film was a huge shock when it dropped for how currently and pointedly political it was. Some of the traditional Mad Max audience was ready for it and welcomed it with open arms, and some of the traditional audience completely rejected it, but none of them missed the message. It's been swept under the carpet and largely forgotten since then, but it was a huge fucking deal at the time.

 

Well, now I think I'm going to have to see it. I'm in favor of movies with lots of strong women.

[sarakingdom]

8 minutes ago, Scaly Freak said:

Well, now I think I'm going to have to see it. I'm in favor of movies with lots of strong women.

 

Do that. Then you can read things like Matriarchy in Mad Max: Mothers, Warriors, and Wives ("The first time I saw Mad Max: Fury Road in theaters, I cried for at least half of it. My roommate was pretty sure I had gone insane, but the simple fact that this movie not only existed but was a big-budget film with beautiful effects and great name recognition was shaking me to my core.") and discussions of eco-feminism and so on. There's a massive amount of thoughtful writing on it. Reaction wasn't uniform, obviously, and that article gets into it, but the film seriously shook the feminist corners of the internet, in positive ways. (And the MRA corners in the opposite ways.) Whatever your reaction to it, it's worth seeing just for the historical social response to it.

 

 

It's brash and violent and wildly unexpected and shouldn't work, but also far more clued-in and consistently well-done than a Mad Max movie has any right to be. Genuinely, it's kind of a work of art, and not in the schlock movie way the old Mad Max films were. Miller and Sixel both brought their A game, and knocked this one put of the park as a piece of filmmaking. And then also made it an open position paper on the smashing of the patriarchy. It was a total shock when it came out, particularly for a film that everyone expected to be a nostalgic 80s cars-and-sausagefest dip into the low-budget back catalog of Mel Gibson. It... was not. It was an eco-feminist Molotov cocktail exploding a regressive Cirque du Soleil rally race in the desert in an attempt to overthrow the exploitative system.

[Harriet]

5 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

 

Basically that. They're an advanced peaceful scientific society grafted onto a secretive violently medieval one.

 

Also, I really want the "Vulcans are emotionless" brigade to tell me with a straight face that Spock's father wasn't dangerously furious when he walked into Kirk's apartment. The sheer grief and fury of that scene was about the most thinly controlled you'll ever see a Vulcan. Dude literally nearly cried when he realized Spock was lost forever. And that's from about the most Vulcan of Vulcans.

 

 

A think your analysis is sound. I wonder if they actually medically engineered their "logic" at some point in their history, or if it evolved naturally.

 

5 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

Yeah, there's a deep lack of stuff like that. It's very slim representation in the film world. And in a lot of the ones that do okay, there's still a fair amount of Token Girl syndrome. (For instance, Rogue One was a great film and treated their female lead super well, but hanging all the representation on one woman is not the way.)  I'm coming to really respect the few shows that make sure they have multiple women. I can't think of any that pass the "17% is equality, 33% is a majority of women" benchmarks people instinctively feel, but at least there are a few shows that go for the 33%. (Maybe Buffy was actually 50% women in the main roles. Doctor Who sort of is, but something about that feels like cheating when they're dropping, on average, two regulars into a new cast and genre every episode. In that one, it's far more dominated by the non-regulars. But it's a small number, is what I'm saying.)

 

Agreed on all. I feel like I have seen a few more women characters in the last few years, but it's not so common that I don't sit up and thank the director when I do.

 

5 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

This, IMO, is one of the things Star Trek has always done unusually well with women. Women have always made up about 33% of their cast, usually three of eight or nine. Admittedly, the execs have often thought that means one is disposable because they have too many women (hi, TOS and TNG), but they always stick roughly around that ratio, which is well over where most shows put their "we have reached parity" numbers, because studies show people feel there's parity under 20%. Trek usually underused women, at least until DS9 and Voyager fixed that, but they have them.

 

Completely consistent with what I've read and learned about such things. Sigh.

 

5 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

I agree with you on the normalising of violent narratives about women and the focus on othering the perpetrators, but I don't think that happened in with this film. It was an utter lightning rod for audiences; it immediately divided them into those threatened by feminism and those who supported it, and made people pick their side. No one missed the message of the film. And because it was 100% unfiltered George Miller, 70-year-old guy single-handedly responsible for the testosterone-fueled Mad Max franchise, no one could dismiss it as SJW meddling by special interest groups. It was a very interesting conversation at the time. I don't know who it convinced, but the audience had a real conversation about objectification and feminism in film. That was the big reason I went to see it, because, while I enjoy some punk dystopia, I didn't really have much Mad Max nostalgia, and had even lower hopes for a film made by an old white dude reliving his big hit B-movie franchise of thirty years earlier. I thought it'd be as regressive as hell. The film was a huge shock when it dropped for how currently and pointedly political it was. Some of the traditional Mad Max audience was ready for it and welcomed it with open arms, and some of the traditional audience completely rejected it, but none of them missed the message. It's been swept under the carpet and largely forgotten since then, but it was a huge fucking deal at the time. No one came out and called George Miller an SJW snowflake because of who he was, but they really wanted to, and made all the same arguments about the film. It was a really polarising film. And Miller absolutely knew it, and welcomed it.

 

I missed the controversy and the discussion, but that's nice to hear! Anything that makes people talk is good. It would have been really good if they had tied that narrative (the evils of objectification and commodification) back into parallels in the real world. Do you think that happened at all in those conversations? I still fear that people could watch it and think "how awful! lucky our society is nothing like that!". We're very good at disappearing injustices.

[sarakingdom]

4 hours ago, Harriet said:

It would have been really good if they had tied that narrative (the evils of objectification and commodification) back into parallels in the real world. Do you think that happened at all in those conversations? I still fear that people could watch it and think "how awful! lucky our society is nothing like that!". We're very good at disappearing injustices.

 

Real life provided its own real world parallel. It was very loudly boycotted by multiple men's groups against feminism who deeply objected to the message of the film, in some of the most stunning male supremacist terms, and it made mainstream news. There was absolutely no doubt about the society we live in. And that was honestly some of the best advertising the film got: a ton of the people who went to see it had no interest in a Mad Max film until they saw the people it made angry.

 

(Men's rights activists are always so obsessed with things getting shoved down their throats...)

 

 

(Honestly, this gif is even better because of the absurdly vulval shape of that cave opening. It's like Star Trek as painted by Georgia O'Keefe.)

 

Huh, I had totally forgotten that Eve Ensler had served as an on-set consultant in depicting sex slavery, because of her work combating sexual violence in the Congo. This film was very carefully done.

 

 

Man, there's some good stuff in the Mary Sue archives. Fury Road, the director's feminist response to his own franchise. George Miller actively wanted the editing done with a woman's POV.

Quote

A product of Australia’s Film School, Margaret Sixel initially turned her husband down, asking, “why do you want me to do an action film?” George’s eyes dance as he repeats his reply triumphantly. “Because if a guy did it, it would look like every other action movie.” [...] "There were massive amounts of footage. Margaret had to find two hours to make it work. Mad Max 2 had 1200 cuts. This has 2700 — and it’s not much longer. She’s got a low boredom threshold and she’s a big problem solver.”

 

Quote

Often, when male directors describe their collaborations with female editors, they mention that women are less inclined to prioritize their ego over the final product than a male editor might be. Martin Scorsese once praised his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker, saying “Filmmaking is a collaboration. People have to learn how to deal with their own egos and work as partners. And I think women are probably better at that [than men].” Similarly, Quentin Tarantino said of why he worked with his late, great editor Sally Menke: “I wanted a female, because I felt a female editor would be more nurturing. To the movie, and to me. Wouldn’t be trying to win their way, just to win their way. Wouldn’t be trying to shove their agenda or win their battles with me. They would be nurturing me through this process.”

I think Scorsese and Tarantino are right–women are sometimes (but not always) more nurturing and deferential than our male peers. That’s not an inherent trait, of course; it’s the result of teaching girls from a young age to be accommodating people-pleasers, particularly when the person in question is a man.

But although I’m really appreciative of Scorsese and Tarantino’s vocal and well-documented appreciation for their respective editors, I also would love to see female editors praised more frequently for being decisive, firm, brilliant, and so on. In order to edit at such an extraordinarily high level as Schoonmaker does and Menke did, you have to possess those qualities, but I think women are commended for them less often than men because those are not considered to be traditionally feminine attributes. That’s not to say Scorsese and Tarantino never talked up those qualities in their collaborators, of course–just that I think it’s telling how often female editors specifically are praised for being nurturing, patient, etc.

That’s one of the many reasons I love that George Miller quote, and appreciate that it’s circulating again in light of Sixel’s win: he doesn’t praise his editor for a traditionally womanly trait; he says she’s a tireless problem solver. It’s nice to see a female editor being praised for more than her ability to put up with a male director’s shit.

 

(Margaret Sixel genuinely was amazing in editing it. I think it was her first action film, and it was astonishing how intricately it was cut. It cuts faster than basically any other movie, while staying completely comprehensible. Part of that is Miller's sort of quirky insistence on simple center framing rather than more common rule of thirds composition; it's great for fast cutting and fast action, because it stays easy to follow where a lot of fast modern films are sort of artsy and chaotic. But I think I read she individually adjusted the playback time of every single shot to accelerate it as fast as possible without losing meaning. I'm not surprised it took three years to edit. I am surprised that the most unrelentingly aggressive dieselpunk action movie ever was made by the exact same director/editor team that made "Babe: Pig in the City".)

 

And links to some breakdowns of how careful the cinematography was to avoid standard male gaze (with how it would have been framed if they had filmed it for the male gaze) and objectification:

Quote

Look at how the Dag is framed almost the same way as Max, even if she’s sitting lower than him. They didn’t shoot her with a mid-shot to include her breasts, they didn’t shoot her from Max’s higher perspective to get her cleavage.

 

Quote

For basically this entire sequence [...] the female body was deemphasized despite the fact that there were 6 female bodies all crammed into a small space and that the entire point is the [mild spoiler about Furiosa’s body]. [...] In fact, throughout this entire sequence, Max’s body was either moving so much as to draw the eye, or physically covering Furiosa up either directly or via his shadow. It would have been so easy for Miller to say, “Only touch her face with your right arm, leave your left arm down so we can see Charlize.” Or to position Dag so that her chest was in the camera’s view. Or to reposition and light Toast, Capable, and Cheedo. Or to make more of Furiosa’s shots mid-shots/chest-included-shots. Or to even just bring in more light. [Directors] take walls and roofs out of sets regularly; the Gigahorse were built specifically for the movie, it would be a very simple thing to deconstruct it so that they could film this scene different.

 

Instead, there was the consistent, multi-layer, multi-level, choice to go out of the way to avoid objectification in this scene.

 

They worked really hard to avoid objectification and male gaze in the film. One of the cinematographers they quote even talks about how his instinct was, essentially, to visually linger on the the pretty girls, and the director absolutely would not let him. He had to be laser-focused on the literal center of the action, and that was it.

 

They did well. The film stands up to a lot of deep dissection about objectification and agency. I have a lot of respect for George Miller when it comes to that movie; onscreen and off, he really was on the ball. He openly made a feminist action film, and did the work to back it up. (I can't get over Eve Ensler as his on-set advisor on an apocalyptic exploding car chase movie. And every person who did the publicity circuit for that film knew precisely what kind of film they'd made and was utterly on message about it. It was very deliberate. Tom Hardy went out there totally prepared for questions about not being the protagonist in a film where he was the title character, and totally prepared for the gender questions. Everyone making that film was on the same page.)

[sarakingdom]

4 hours ago, Harriet said:

A think your analysis is sound. I wonder if they actually medically engineered their "logic" at some point in their history, or if it evolved naturally.

 

TOS answers this! In the Abraham Lincoln episode. Space-Buddha comes along and wins over the whole planet to stop them all from wiping themselves out with peaceful, logical space Buddhism. It's essentially their religion.

 

It gets fleshed put a little more elsewhere. Some of it's in the TOS novels, but they must get it from throwaway comments in the series. There's probably some in that episode in season three where Spock and McCoy have that threesome with the cavegirl in the past. Basically, ancient Vulcans, and indeed Vulcans without their insistence on logic, are violently emotional, with emphasis on the violent. The logic thing keeps them from wiping themselves out, so they're Very Serious about it. It's trained, not inherent. A hundred percent willpower and choice.

 

With the knowledge of other Trek sources, I can in fact put a number on that for you: about 2100 years before TOS.

[Harriet]

4 minutes ago, sarakingdom said:

 

TOS answers this! In the Abraham Lincoln episode. Space-Buddha comes along and wins over the whole planet to stop them all from wiping themselves out with peaceful, logical space Buddhism. It's essentially their religion.

 

It gets fleshed put a little more elsewhere. Some of it's in the TOS novels, but they must get it from throwaway comments in the series. There's probably some in that episode in season three where Spock and McCoy have that threesome with the cavegirl in the past. Basically, ancient Vulcans, and indeed Vulcans without their insistence on logic, are violently emotional, with emphasis on the violent. The logic thing keeps them from wiping themselves out, so they're Very Serious about it. It's trained, not inherent. A hundred percent willpower and choice.

 

With the knowledge of other Trek sources, I can in fact put a number on that for you: about 2100 years before TOS.

 

Oh wow, this is a great backstory!!! love it.

[Harriet]

15 minutes ago, sarakingdom said:

 

Real life provided its own real world parallel. It was very loudly boycotted by multiple men's groups against feminism who deeply objected to the message of the film, in some of the most stunning male supremacist terms, and it made mainstream news. There was absolutely no doubt about the society we live in. And that was honestly some of the best advertising the film got: a ton of the people who went to see it had no interest in a Mad Max film until they saw the people it made angry.

 

(Men's rights activists are always so obsessed with things getting shoved down their throats...)

 

 

 

Nice. (Both the gif and the fact that the movie made male supremacists angry ?)

[sarakingdom]

3 minutes ago, Harriet said:

Oh wow, this is a great backstory!!! love it.

 

If you want some more of this sort of thing, Diane Duane's TOS novel "Spock's World" is quite good worldbuilding, and I think AC Crispin's book "Sarek" might have some of that, too. Not technically canon, I guess, but honestly might as well be. It's not significantly contradicted by anything that came later (and where it is, the later things are generally very stupid, and easy to dismiss on the grounds that they're utterly stupid), and they probably put more thought and writing chops into it than anything on TV. The early tie-ins are a little dated-feeling, but not by the mindset of the writers in question, so I'll forgive bits of technology we've bypassed and so on. (Hardcopy printouts and space-usenet newsgroups!) Honestly, it's kind of like pro-quality fanfic issued as a tie-in novel, that's how early this stuff was in the history of genre evolution. But that's sort of adorably quaint, and also a little subversive, so I can dig it.

 

The Romulan are basically quite a recent Vulcan offshoot, so you sort of see the violent and cunning political intrigue they tend to favor. That plus nuclear-type weapons seem to have been the big turning point. (The one good thing Enterprise did with the Vulcans, and there were not many, was a little bit of backstory about Surak, their Buddha figure, dying of radiation sickness during a war where the Romulans broke away and left Vulcan. Everything else they did with Vulcans was ridiculous, insanely superficial and generic space alien, tough to square with prior canon, or all of the above, so I ignore it all. But that set of episodes had the only three convincing depictions of Vulcans in the whole four year run of the show, so I accept a few minutes of the show as canon.) It's sort of a whole "had tons of wars all through history, nearly wiped themselves put a few times, and during a really bad period, Surak came along and gelled all the prior philosophy of logic into a coherent one that he then managed to spread to all the warlords," with some mystical desert wandering and a sacred mountain. Which you actually saw in Search for Spock, though that probably pre-dated Surak.

[sarakingdom]

11 hours ago, Harriet said:

Nice. (Both the gif

 

I have genuinely been waiting for the right time to use that gif for 6-8 months, and now two opportunities come along in one week.

[Tanktimus the Encourager]

If I'm not mistaken, today is the day for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

Watch out for phallic imagery, important ecological Aesops, and colorful metaphor.

[sarakingdom]

5 hours ago, Tanktimus the Encourager said:

If I'm not mistaken, today is the day for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

Watch out for phallic imagery, important ecological Aesops, and colorful metaphor.

 

Today is indeed the day.

 

Am I allowed to use colorful metaphor in reference to the phallic imagery?